As long as there have been elections, there have been attempts to keep eligible people from voting.
Adam Cohen
Gun violence in the U.S. is an epidemic.
Adam Cohen
The public has a right to know what kind of monitoring the government is doing, and there should be a public discussion of the appropriate trade-offs between law enforcement and privacy rights.
Adam Cohen
For people worried about the Great Recession and the uncertainty of what is coming next, the characters of ‘Mad Men’ are good company.
Adam Cohen
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the major achievement of President Obama’s first term.
Adam Cohen
When tulip mania dies down, all that remains are pretty flowers. When bubbles burst, nothing is left but soapy residue. But the Internet revolution, for all its speculative excesses, really is changing the world.
Adam Cohen
There was a rule, back when I was an education lawyer in Alabama, about visiting public schools: always go on a rainy day so you can see how badly the roofs leak.
Adam Cohen
Voting in presidential and congressional elections is a national right – and the national government should protect it.
Adam Cohen
The Enron scandal is worthy of the highest level of scrutiny, both because of the enormity of the crimes that may have been committed and because of what the largest bankruptcy in American history has already begun to reveal about the weaknesses in our nation’s corporate structures and regulatory oversight.
Adam Cohen
Age discrimination is illegal. But when compared with discrimination against racial minorities and women, it is a second-class civil rights issue.
Adam Cohen
As self-driving cars become more common, there will be a flood of new legal questions.
Adam Cohen
If we are going to have self-driving cars, the technical specifications should be quite precise.
Adam Cohen
Liberal judges tend to be expansive about things like equal protection, while conservatives read more into ones like ‘the right to bear arms.’
Adam Cohen
In the James Cameron blockbuster ‘Avatar,’ 3-D cinematography is the real star. The bugs and crawling creatures seem to slither into the theater seats. The floating mountains of the planet Pandora hover gloriously overhead. And the Na’Vi, Pandora’s 10-foot-tall, blue-skinned natives, come convincingly to life.
Adam Cohen
The remarkable thing about ‘Avatar’ is the degree to which the technology is integral to the story. It is important to show Pandora and its Na’Vi natives in 3-D because ‘Avatar’ is fundamentally about the moral necessity of seeing other beings fully.
Adam Cohen
The worst excesses of the dot-com era are gone.
Adam Cohen
Amazon is holding its own because the service it provides – offering millions of books and other items quickly and easily from home at any hour of the day or night – is a real one, and one that was impossible before there was an Internet.
Adam Cohen
Republicans and blacks had an unlikely alliance around ‘max black’ after the 1990 census. By concentrating black voters in some districts, the strategy elected a record number of black congressmen in 1992. But the remaining ‘bleached’ districts were more likely to elect white Republicans.
Adam Cohen
People’s genes can say a great deal about their health. There are genes that reveal an increased likelihood of getting cancer, heart disease or Alzheimer’s.
Adam Cohen
Patents have a place in medical science – for new inventions that advance the state of knowledge.
Adam Cohen
In a perfect world, we would have put users in control of their information when the Internet was first created.
Adam Cohen
We should craft our laws to allow images of criminal suspects to be captured in public – but also to make sure that the government does not unduly infringe on the privacy rights of innocent citizens.
Adam Cohen
The first thing to understand about surveillance video in public places is that there is already a lot of it going on – though it is impossible to know how much.
Adam Cohen
It makes sense to have cameras in places where terrorism and crime are of particular concern – such as in Times Square or near major bridges and tunnels. It would be more troubling to learn, however, that the government has focused cameras on the front doors of our homes just to keep track of our comings and goings.
Adam Cohen
When the government takes video of people in public places, the images should only be kept as long as they may reasonably be needed to investigate a crime. After a few days, if there has not been a report of a crime, they should be destroyed.
Adam Cohen
State assaults on the separation of church and state are nothing new.
Adam Cohen
With increased awareness should come greater caution about how confessions are used at trial – and a greater willingness to overturn convictions when it becomes clear that a confession was untrue.
Adam Cohen
A Reagan appointee, Justice Kennedy is no liberal, as he has shown on issues from affirmative action to corporate campaign spending. But he has repeatedly sided with gay litigants before the court.
Adam Cohen
If you’re going to call a book ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History,’ readers will expect some serious carrying on about race, and Thomas Woods Jr. does not disappoint.
Adam Cohen
A publicly run health care program could compete with private insurance companies, which have a record of overcharging and underperforming.
Adam Cohen
The whole New Deal was in a sense just a series of public options, some more optional than others, that offered government as an alternative to the often-flawed private market.
Adam Cohen
Social Security, all public and no option, rescued older Americans from living their final years in poverty.
Adam Cohen
To be rejected on account of old age may or may not feel the same as being rejected on the basis of race or sex. But it is clearly unjust and dehumanizing, and the law should take it more seriously than it does.
Adam Cohen
Set in the advertising world of the 1960s, ‘Mad Men’ is stunning to look at – a Camelot-era parade of smartly dressed professionals lounging around on midcentury modern furniture.
Adam Cohen
To a generation beaten down by skyrocketing unemployment, plunging retirement savings, and mounting home foreclosures, ‘Mad Men’ offers the schadenfreude-filled message that their predecessors were equally unhappy – and that the bleakness meter in American life has always been set on high.
Adam Cohen
Escapism makes a lot of intuitive sense – whisk people away from their cares with stories of a better life.
Adam Cohen
A little-appreciated downside of the technology revolution is that, mainly without thinking about it, we have given up ‘locational privacy.’
Adam Cohen
As much as possible, location-specific information should not be collected in the first place, or not in personally identifiable form.
Adam Cohen
When locational information is collected, people should be given advance notice and a chance to opt out. Data should be erased as soon as its main purpose is met.
Adam Cohen
After you pay your E-ZPass bill, there is no reason for the government to keep records of your travel.
Adam Cohen
Corporations have enormous treasuries, and there are a lot of things they want from government, many of which clash with the public interest.
Adam Cohen
There is something not entirely satisfying about an online memorial.
Adam Cohen
Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more, while judges like Ms. Sotomayor are activists. But there is no magic right way to interpret terms like ‘free speech’ or ‘due process’ – or potato chip.
Adam Cohen
It is hard to imagine an area in which Congress has more express constitutional authority to act than in protecting the right of minorities to vote.
Adam Cohen
It was not until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s that Congress got serious about the assignment laid out in the post-Civil War amendments.
Adam Cohen
There is a lot of talk in conservative circles about judicial modesty and deferring to the political branches. That view of judging often overlooks the important role that courts have in protecting people’s rights. But if there was ever a time to defer, it is when Congress is protecting voting rights in the exact way the Constitution directs it to.
Adam Cohen
In zombie horror, the juxtaposition of the calm world of the living and the menace of the undead inspires terror. In zombie comedy, like ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,’ it is played for laughs.
Adam Cohen
Regency romances end in marriage; zombie stories end in the zombies being vanquished. ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ delivers both.
Adam Cohen
Vampires are sleek demons for good times. They suavely leech off society – like investment bankers who plunder outsize shares of deals for themselves or rapacious fund managers.
Adam Cohen
Law graduates have always ended up in business, government, journalism and other fields. Law schools could do more to build these subjects into their coursework.
Adam Cohen
The blogosphere makes it possible to have a sprawling national conversation about the hard times – often among people who would never find each other offline.
Adam Cohen
Anti-New Deal rhetoric has never disappeared from American political life.
Adam Cohen
